Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (49 page)

The final warning buzzed.

“Fuck!” My spit froze when it hit the ground.

I hit full blown panic. My heart tripped like the back-bass before the drop. Only this time, the other side was built of misery not ecstasy.

If only I had paid my cell bill. If only my father was still alive, to catch my sorry ass. If only I had lied to Rain, shared her cab. If only Jessica hadn’t called it a drop.

When you’re panicked, it’s tough as hell to keep any rational sense of time. I figured I was cooked. So I closed my eyes. But when the pain didn’t come, I sat down on the cold curb, and felt the chill seep through my clothes.

I bit my lip. Tasted blood.

The first jolt ripped through my body. I wanted to writhe in pain on the sidewalk, but my body was stuck in shock-rigor. An immobile gift for the cops.

I imagined Rain beside me.

“You’re an asshole,” she said.

“Sorry.”

She morphed into Jessica, her purple eyes wide with fear. “I’m lost,” she said.

“Take my hand.” I wanted to reach out, but I couldn’t move. My fingers looked nearly white in the cold. Her fingers seemed to shiver around mine, as though they were made of joy, not flesh. Then she touched my hand and I knew in that moment that life existed outside of stimulation, in a place where reality wasn’t lame or boring. Life danced to an irregular rhythm that couldn’t synch to any sample.

She let go.

The judiciary pulse jolted again. I flopped to the pavement, distantly aware that my skull would remind me for a long time after about its current state of squishage.

The parole-board must have lived for irony, because the jolt lasted for so long that I
welcomed
the release. A pants-wetting, please-make-it-stop, urgent need for the end.

Drop.

About the Author

Suzanne Church lives near Toronto, Ontario with her two teenaged sons. She is a 2011 and 2012 Aurora Award finalist for her short fiction. She writes Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror because she enjoys them all and hates to play favorites. When cornered she becomes fiercely Canadian. Her stories have appeared in
Cicada
and
On Spec,
and in several anthologies including
Chilling Tales: Evil Did I Dwell; Lewd I Did Live and Tesseracts 14.

All the Things the Moon is Not

Alexander Lumans

A call comes over the vidchannel: “Murph, you sitting down?”

“Always.” At the moment I’m standing in my darkened cabin at base camp in Mare Nubium. By headlamp only I carve a chess piece—a knight—out of moon rock. I’d crushed one earlier after Tchaikovsky called me out on a dumb move.

The screen and radio cut out. I switch channels, then switch back to hear: “Get up. You need to see this.” Tamsen sounds serious. She always sounds serious. It’s one of the things I like most about her.

“I’m busy.” I keep sanding the knight’s head. When no response follows, just space static, I give in. “What is it?”

More static, then: “The Russians.”

I blow on the knight. Moondust reels through the headlamp’s beam. I think it beautiful. I’d carved this set my first month here on the moon. The dust I compare to stars. The space between them, too, is beautiful. And the same old lines are running through my head—
Goodnight room, goodnight moon
—the ones I’d read in bed to my daughters. I grab the mic: “Tell Tchaikovsky he needs to ready his Nastoyka supply.”

Tchaikovsky is a mold pirate, the one thing we have in the way of a rival. But he’s also a good chess player. He studied his masters. Knew openings I’d never heard of. He’s the only distraction here that keeps me honest. Down on earth, who has the calm or the fire for chess anymore? Since our four-man crew arrived late last August to harvest the
Dreammold!,
I’ve been in two modes: defend and defend again. Whether it’s harvesting, carving, or playing, give it 98%. I’ve always been one to open my games with the tried and true; Sicilian Defense all the way. Only recently have I begun to wonder if this is the right way to go about it. Tchaikovsky and I have an unfriendly wager: loser ponies up a bottle of their nation’s choicest liquor. By my count, I’ve handed over seventeen handles of Maker’s Mark. And he? Not a drop of vodka.

In four weeks the transport will be here to take us home. I want to win, for once. I want things to go my way.

“We found their ship.”

“There’s plenty of mold out there,” I tell her. “Let the little cosmonaut stake his claim.” I’ve given up playing moon ranger. A year in one-sixth gravity and white rooms and the company of little love does that to good intentions.

This time, not even static.

“Tamsen.” I set the knight on d5. “Tamsen?”

“—the problem.” I only catch this last part. But I
am
busy. A good kind of busy. In eight moves, I’ll have the Russian mated—Rg2++—even after losing my queen early on. And now Tamsen, with whatever problem there is, has carved that good feeling out of me.

In Buggy 2, I zoom south to her position at the edge of Tycho Crater. It’s where we go for the best mold harvesting. I can throw a rock into the crater and watch the moldripples go on for miles:
yellowyellowyellow.
“Twenty-eight days,” I remind myself.

Tamsen’s standing by Buggy 1, big gloved hands on her big suited hips. She’s radioed the rest of the crew too. Bouncing around in our suits, the four of us resemble primitive undersea divers with portholes for masks and twin oxygen tanks. Spitzer’s busy poking the mold. When I used to hear the Rockies’ announcer describe a batter with “warning track power,” I didn’t realize I was imagining Spitzer. Long-limbed and morally impulsive, he’s always asking me, “When do I get to stab the flagpole into something?” Vinegar Tom—he’s just staring into the crater. I’m thankful for our helmets. Yesterday, I’d walked in on him and Tamsen fucking in her room—they didn’t see me—and now I don’t want to look him in the face for the rest of the mission. Not out of shame, but because he got to her first, because it made me realize I’ve always hated this planet. Him. His copy of
Desperate Passage: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West
that he intently flips through in the mess hall like he’s studying one of the buggies’ operation manuals.

Tamsen taps her helmet. I tap mine back. The vidchannel and radio have been fritzing. We haven’t talked with mission control since Tuesday and we don’t know what’s wrong with the transmitter. All we hear back is fuzz.

Beyond her and the others, at the crater’s edge, I see Tchaikovsky’s ship. And I see the mold; that
is
the problem. What had been his illegal operation is now covered in the
Dreammold!,
utterly and completely. It’s as if Tycho burped up some fantastic wave that came crashing down mid-ops. The scene reminds me of Denver, the day after.

I draw a finger across my neck, point at the Russians’ ship, and then shrug. We bounce over to it and pry open the bay door. The vessel’s guts are clogged with as much yellow gunk as the outer shell is coated.

A flash in me of something Tchaikovsky’d said after taking my queen: “Ze bigger zey are, Afraham Lincoln, ze more it rains rats and clogs.” He was forever butchering Americanisms, but sometimes I had to admire the results. They made as much sense on the moon as anything else did back home.

Fifty feet from the Russian’s ship, Tamsen’s waving me over. She stands calf-deep in mold on the crater’s rim. At her feet is a single set of boot-tracks. It leads from the ruined ship out into Tycho’s depths.

Back at base camp, I stare at the same game from before.

“So the mold is moving,” says Vinegar Tom from behind me. His voice always sounds surprisingly nasal; surprising because he’s missing his nose. It makes his bucked teeth stand out all the more. “Now we don’t have to drive as far to get it.”

I’m too preoccupied to respond and too besieged to care.

“You had your games with the Commie, I know. It’s
terrible.
A bad way to go. But we’ve all seen terrible things on the news.” I can hear the smirk in his voice, smell the vinegar on his breath. He’d quit the space program to be a butcher in Ohio, but when The Drought killed that industry, he came trudging back to Cape Canaveral. “Though I suppose some of us have seen it up close,” he goes on. “Been able to
smell
the terrible.” He reaches around from behind me and flicks over the white king.

“That’s
my
king, asshole.”

“I know.”

After I finish wiping the blood from Vinegar Tom’s lip off my elbow, I say, “Touch my game again, see what happens.”

He looks down at the board, then at me, as if considering it. He’s short and brash and sporadically clean-shaven. Exactly the kind of man I can picture behind a meat counter. The skinfolds where his nose should be remind me of how the Rocky Mountains look on military raised-relief maps. “If we have to eat each other at some point between now and the 30th,” he says, “I’m going to make you eat me.”

An hour later, I set the white king upright. Eight moves: 37. Qb3 Rd1+ 38. Kg2 Rd2+ 39. Kg3 Ne3 40. Qxe3 Rg2++. I pick up my newest knight. The jawline is clean, the eyes sharp notches. Calmly, I hurl it at the cabin wall. It hits hard and slowly fragments.

I imagine the conversation at NASA went something like this:

“Sir, the moon is shiny.”

“It’s always been shiny.”

“No, sir, there are shiny parts.”

“Today is not April Fool’s Day.”

“Telescope Two picked them up.”

“
Shiny
parts?”

“We thought it was silver.”

“Moonsilver. That has a good ring to it.”

“It’s not silver.”

“Okay. Mercury, rhodium, zinc, what isn’t it?”

“Telescope Two is a very good telescope.”

“
Moon
silver.”

“First, sir, it’s important that we keep this a secret.”

“I agree. Everyone likes jewelry. Everyone’s a magpie.”

“That’s not what we mean.”

“Tell me already. You’re killing me here!”

“It’s water.”

“Is water shiny?”

“We found shiny water. On the moon.”

“Shit.”

“That’s what we’re supposed to say: ’shit.’ We said you wouldn’t say that.”

“Who knows about this?”

“Everyone. Everyone’s a magpie for this kind of news.”

“And you’re sure it’s not April Fool’s?”

“We’re sure it’s not silver.”

“Shit.”

By then, The Drought had settled in, five long years and still holding strong. Ice, Aquafina, and public pools were all things of the past. The U.S.’s initial investigative moonlanding found plenty of water. And it found what was growing in the water, too: the mold. We sampled it, brought it to Florida, found it useful. So the U.S. pushed through amendments to the TRIPS agreement to include protections for other planets’ resources. And they shipped the four of us up here to harvest it for a year until the next round of crewmen arrives.

We know it’s been almost a year because of the calendar in the mess hall. Each month features a new war poster.

“Ten fingers good! Eight claws bad!”

“Use your thumbs! Recycle your scrap metal and keep the MegaHun at bay!”

“When you live alone, you live with Megafauns.”

Vinegar Tom says they’re invigorating. I’m sick of them. But there’s little else to focus on between sleeping and eating and sporing and fighting and fucking. And work.

The word
Dreammold!
once summoned in me the image of a fantasyland of iridescent clouds. Now I can’t think of a less suitable name. It’s this terrible
yellow,
with the look of cauliflower heads but the consistency of dry, packed snow.

Our only tools: large meat cleavers, T-handle baling hooks, and what’s essentially a giant George Foreman. Everything’s run solar, even the powercyclers that pump out our CO2. I’d be thrilled by the technology if I thought it’d actually save me.

Step 1: Cut four by four squares out of the moldline.

Step 2: Hook the square on both sides and lift free.

Step 3: Place in grill box and seal shut.

The box broils the mold and compresses it. These hard pancakes go into storage until the semi-monthly unmanned cargo capsule arrives. Then we unload the capsule’s supplies (dried food, Maker’s Mark, oxygen tanks) before stacking the pancakes in its bay and sending it back to be fashioned into fuel, fixodent, and firearms for the Megafaun War.

The hordes hit Denver three days before I was scheduled for liftoff. I was there. Home with my family, eating chocolate chip waffles. The first wave struck late that morning. Wild pigs with mammoth tusks and armor plating. The ground shook. The South Platte sewage flowed backward. Then the rest of the Megafauns streamed out of the mountains, as if they’d been hiding there for centuries, breeding, tripling in size. So thirsty and fast. The winged kind broke into the top floor of the CenturyLink Tower. Fifty-point elks and shaggy aardvarks nested in INVESCO Field. Horned bears with snouts shaped like ice cream scoops covered the suburbs in blood and fur. They came for my family—wife, daughter, younger daughter, youngest daughter, our fox terrier Ralph, me—but we hid in the basement. I thought we’d be fine with a barricaded door. Before dark, I went upstairs for food with Ralph on my heels. Only, he bolted through the doggy door. I found myself chasing him down the street, imagining my daughters’ streaming faces if I had to tell them I lost Ralphie. A block down, heavy grunts sounded from someone’s garage. I had to run home empty-handed. But when I came back down into the basement, arms full of consolation Fruit Roll-ups and Zebra Cakes and no dog, all I came back to was this big hole. Taken, and not even with a loud crashing I could replay in my head. Just nothing nowhere forever. It must have only taken seconds. I sat down on the stairs. I only thought I heard barking. I ate three fruit Roll-ups. I ate six Zebra Cakes. I waited. And when they didn’t come back, I slept in my youngest daughter’s bed, saying, goodnight nobody.